The case of the monster.., p.1
The Case of the Monster Fire,
p.1
The Case of the Monster Fire
John R. Erickson
Illustrations by Gerald L. Holmes
Maverick Books, Inc.
Publication Information
MAVERICK BOOKS
Published by Maverick Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 549, Perryton, TX 79070
Phone: 806.435.7611
www.hankthecowdog.com
Published in the United States of America by Maverick Books, Inc., 2018
Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2018
All rights reserved
Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-171-1
Hank the Cowdog® is a registered trademark of John R. Erickson.
Printed in the United States of America
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Dedication
Dedicated to the hundreds of kind people who helped us after the wildfire of 2017, with special thanks to Scot and Tina Erickson, Mark Erickson, and George and Karen Chapman.
Contents
Chapter One - The Mouse Didn’t Run Down the Clock
Chapter Two - A Robot on the Porch!
Chapter Three - Not a Robot
Chapter Four - Slim Wears a Suit
Chapter Five - A Bad Wind
Chapter Six - Smoke!
Chapter Seven - Evacuation
Chapter Eight - We Race the Fire
Chapter Nine - We Search For Drover
Chapter Ten - Help Arrives
Chapter Eleven - The Mysterious Marsh Berries
Chapter Twelve - Together In This
Chapter One: The Mouse Didn’t Run Down the Clock
It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The main part of this story takes place in March, oh what a terrible day, but to get there, we have to go back to October. Around here, October always happens before March. I don’t know why, it just does.
So it was October before the next March. Drover and I had spent the night at Slim’s place, as we often do because, well, he lets us stay inside the house. I had been up for hours, going over a stalk of poperwick…a stack of pickerwarp on my disk, when I hicked a honk in the frizzling fubble.
Huh?
Sorry, I’m having a little trouble with my words. Every once in a while, we have this pablum, so bee sting beside the honey hive and the mouse ran down the clock. When that hurples, we murple the purple.
Huh?
Sorry, my attention drifted there for a second, but I’m back up to speed now. We were discussing the mouse problem. These mice keep running down our clocks, don’t you see, and when the clocks run down, we don’t know whether it’s raining or Tuesday. Tuesdays are very important in the overall scheme of things, because without Tuesday, we would never be able to measure our rainfall.
Yawn.
You know, some of this isn’t making sense. How did we get onto the subject of mice and clocks and Tuesday? I mean, what is Tuesday to a mouse?
Does anyone remember what we were talking about?
Wait, here we go. Early morning, and I mean EARLY. Dawn. First light. At that hour, most of your ordinary mutts are still sprawled out on the floor, pumping out a line of Z’s. In other words, sleeping their lives away.
Not me, fellers. I take pride in being the first one up. In the Security Business, we have little time for sleeping. At first light, I’m on the jib of the jab…I’m on the job.
May I whisper a little secret? See, one of my greatest fears in life is being infected with the Slacker Virus. Drover’s had it all his life, and we’re talking about BAD, and I’m scared I might catch it.
That’s why, every morning before daylight, I leap out of bed and start doing pushups and pull-ups…pretzels and pork rinds, ketchup on poperwick, and plan out my whole day’s snizzle, whilst all the slackers of the world are still snickerdoodling.
Wait. I seem to have lost my choo-choo…my train of thought, that is, so let’s take a deep breath and start all over.
Okay, Drover and I must have spent the night at Slim’s place, now we’re cookin’, and I had been up for hours, grinding out reports and studying mops and chops…maps and charts, that is, while chained to my desk. I heard an odd sound…several odd sounds and cranked open one eye.
Wait, that can’t be right. I’d been working for hours, so both eyes must have been open, yes, wide open, so if you don’t mind, get a red pencil and mark out that business about “cranked open one eye.” I was misquibbled…misquoted, shall we say.
Go ahead and mark it out. Thanks.
I heard a sound, looked up from my work, and saw…hang on, this is scary…I saw what appeared to be an Egyptian mummy creeping down the dark hallway, sliding its hand along the wall. Somehow radar hadn’t picked him up. Well, you know me. When a mummy shows up in the house, we sound General Quackers.
General Quarters, it should be.
A strip of hair shot up along my backbone and a growl came rumbling up from the engine room. Fellers, I BARKED!
“Hush!”
Huh?
Did you hear that? The mummy said…wait a second. Do you suppose…ha ha. Okay, we can call off the alert. Everybody relax. Ha ha. No big deal, just a simple…hey, when radar doesn’t pick ‘em up, how are we supposed to know?
It was Slim Chance, but believe me, he looked like some kind of mummy monster, I mean pale face and puffy red eyes and a rat’s nest of hair. And he was wearing boxer shorts too. That’s on our Check List For Mummies. They almost always show up wearing boxer shorts.
Okay, things were starting to fall into place. The Elite Troops of the ranch’s Security Division had camped at Slim’s place, and it was morning. It was also October and every dog on the force was exhausted.
Let me emphasize the exhausted part. See, if portions of the preceding so-forth sounded, well, disjointed, that’s why. Our team had been pushed to the limits of Doggie Endurance, I mean, eighteen-hour days, no breaks, no weekends or holidays, no time off, just the grinding routine of running the ranch.
So, yes, Drover and I had spent the night down at Slim’s place, and I’m going to stand before you right now and admit that I might have dozed off at my desk—not a deep sleep, nothing like Drover, I mean, the runt was in a coma, but maybe I’d been drifting in and out of focus.
Hey, it happens, even to the Head of Ranch Security, but now I was wide awake and back on the job.
Slim had pried himself out of bed, and I watched as he stumbled into the kitchen and made himself some coffee. As usual, he turned on the stove burner and left the gas running whilst he scratched a wooden match across the matchbox. As usual, it took several scratches to light the match, so when he finally put it under the pan of water, we had a little propane explosion.
As usual, he seemed surprised. Duh. I mean, propane blows up when you leave it running. There are no exceptions. It happens every time, and the longer you dawdle, the bigger the pow.
If you wonder why cowboys don’t have hair on the back of their hands, this is the reason. Slim has even lost eyebrows.
Incredible.
Dogs don’t enjoy explosions in the morning. We would like to help our people when they don’t function well, but do they ever listen to their dogs or ask for our advice? No. So we go through this every day of the world.
He finally got the water boiling and dumped some coffee into the pan. He waited a few minutes, then sloshed it into a cup. He hadn’t washed that cup in two years, by the way, and it was exactly the color of two-year old coffee.
After downing a couple of slurps, he crept out on the porch in his drawers and a T-shirt and brought in an armload of firewood. Stepping over me and Drover…stepping over Stubtail, who was sprawled out on the floor, he picked his way across the room toward the…
“Hank, move!”
…picked his way across the room to the stove, tripping on Drover in the process. He opened the stove door and placed a strip of dry cedar bark on the coals, blew on the coals until the bark caught fire, and added a few sticks of hackberry. Before long, he had a nice little fire going, closed the door, and set the damper.
Then he glared down at us and grumbled, “If this outfit depended on y’all to build a fire, we’d freeze to death.”
Oh brother. I ignored him.
You know, it’s strange that our story should start with a fire, because that’s how it’s going to…no, that’s all I can say. I mean, it was such an awful…
We can’t talk about it, sorry, and don’t beg or whine. I have to be firm on this. You know how I am about the children. Some parts of this job are just too scary for the little guys, and there’s no fire insurance for spectators. I mean, what if your book bursted into flames?
Don’t laugh. It could happen.
I’m not at liberty to reveal any more information because it’s highly classified and you’re not supposed to know any of this, so the next big question is…do you want to go on with the story?
If not, brush your teeth and go to bed. If you’re still with me
Where were we? Oh yes, Sally May’s rotten little cat. He drives me batty, and he knows that he drives me batty. He thrives on driving me batty. It seems to be the whole purpose of his life. He went to kitty college and got a degree in Batty Driving, but one of these days…
We weren’t talking about the cat.
Tell you what, let’s take a little break and change chapters. If you don’t show up for Chapter Two, I’ll have to go on without you.
Chapter Two: A Robot on the Porch!
Okay, I had been up most of the night working on reports. Drover was sprawled across the floor like spilled milk, sleeping his life away. Slim had managed to build a cup of coffee without blowing up the kitchen and had chunked up the fire in the wood stove, and now he was sitting in his big easy chair, like a king in his castle, with a loyal dog at his feet. But then…
Suddenly Earoscanners began picking up something outside the house. I made adjustments on the antennas until we were getting a clear signal. Data Control chewed on that and sent the alert:
“Tires on gravel, possible intrusion of unidentified vehicle, activate Warning System and prepare to launch!”
We don’t get much time to respond to these Morning Intrusions, and we never know who it might be. It doesn’t matter. We have to give a professional response, ready or not, and that’s what I did. The instant DC’s message flashed across the screen, I went into Stage One Barking. It’s wired into the system, don’t you see. It’s automatic, and loud.
WOOF!
Slim had just taken a slurp of coffee, and my woof goosed him so much, he spilled hot coffee on his shirt, shorts, and naked legs.
“Ow! Moron!” He flew out of the chair, spilling more coffee on the threadbare carpet, and glared at me like…I don’t know what, and screeched, “What’s wrong with you!”
What was wrong with me was that I was a highly-trained professional cowdog in charge of First Response Security. An unidentified vehicle had just entered our airspace. We’d picked it up on Earoscanners and were tracking its every movement. Data Control had sent down a Stage One Alert and was assembling the Firing Data.
That’s what was wrong with me.
“Meathead! You scalded my legs!”
Oh brother. I didn’t scald his legs. He scalded his own skinny legs with his own coffee, and if he’d been wearing pants instead of sitting around half-naked, he wouldn’t have scalded anything.
Oh, and did we have time for this silly discussion? An intruder, possibly an enemy agent, was creeping up on the house!
I can’t be blamed for the lack of discipline on this ranch. We should have been scrambling jets and launching dogs. We should have been into Stage Two or Stage Three Barking. We should have been doing SOMETHING to defend his house and my ranch from Enemy Intrudement. Instead, he was yelling at the Head of Security and calling him a meathead.
In many ways, this is a lousy job. They don’t pay us enough to put up with this. Oh well.
So there we were, carrying on a silly conversation in the midst of a crisis, but things kind of took care of themselves. By that time, Slim could hear the sound of tires crunching gravel outside. His eyes grew wide and he muttered, “Good honk, somebody just pulled up!”
Duh.
He rushed to the front window and peeked through the dusty, barf-colored curtains that had been there since the Civil War. “Oh great!”
Apparently it wasn’t good news, because he was transformed into some kind of wild man. Maybe he didn’t want to fight the intruder in his undershorts.
Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I didn’t mean to say that the intruder was showing up in his undershorts. That would be ridiculous. Intruders don’t do that. I meant to say that Slim…let’s just skip it.
As we’ve discussed before, Slim is usually not a ball of flames first thing in the morning. Sometimes we need to check his pulse to be sure he isn’t a corpse. Remember that only minutes before, I had mistaken him for a mummy.
Give him two cups of coffee and thirty minutes of solitude, staring at flies on the wall, and he’ll come around, but this deal had wrecked his train. He became an explosion of arms, legs, and desperate expressions.
He made a dash down the dark hallway and vanished into his bedroom. There, he tripped over the boots he’d left in the middle of the floor. I didn’t see this with my own eyes but heard it, and knew the story: He never puts a boot into the closet if he can leave it in the middle of the floor.
Then I heard him say, “What in the cat hair is that old man doing over here at this hour of the morning?”
Who?
Bam Bam Bam!
Yipes, somebody was banging on the door! Well, we’d gotten an Alert from DC and our procedures were very clear: Make no assumptions about intruders until we see some ID and clear them through Security. As far as I was concerned, we had come under attack.
I went straight into Sirens and Lights. “On your feet, Drover, battle stations, Red Alert, we’ve got Charlies on the porch!”
You know, I get a kick out of waking him up. Hee hee. I mean, he started running before he got his eyes open, before his feet even hit the floor, and all four legs were pumping air.
“Help, murder, mayday, Charlies on the porch!”
“On your feet, soldier, and load up Number Three Warning Barks!”
He finally scrambled to his feet, got traction, and ran smooth into the coffee table. Down he went. “Help, they got me! Dog down! Oh my leg!”
There was more banging on the door, then a booming voice. “Slim? You in there?”
That raised the hair along my backbone, I mean, no more laughing at Stubtail. We’re talking about a deep, snickister voice that didn’t even sound human!
“Drover, the Charlies must have sent some kind of robot probe to break down the door!”
“Help!”
“The only thing between us and destruction is us!”
“Help!”
“Take weapons and ammo and three of your best men, and crawl to the door!”
“I don’t have three men.”
“Perfect. You’ll be harder to see.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Move out and set up a firing position.”
“Yeah, but…”
“If they bust through the door, let ‘em have it, give ‘em the full load. Any questions?”
“This leg’s killing me!”
“That’s not a question and nobody cares. On your feet, let’s get this job done and go home.”
“Can we go home first?”
“Negatory. Boots on the floor!”
“Hank, you might have to help me up. This old leg’s really giving me fits.”
Oh brother. “Okay, stand by for Assisted Lift.” Using my nose and enormous neck muscles as a prying device, I managed to get his front end off the floor, then went to work lifting his bohunkus. “Okay, trooper, that’s four on the floor. Get out there and unload some ordinance!”
“How ‘bout you?”
“Fine, thanks. Go git ‘em!”
He took two steps toward the door, stopped, glanced back at me, and…you won’t believe this. Drover is such a little chicken liver! I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.
You know, my biggest problem in this job is that I’m a foolish optimist. I keep hoping to see progress in the men, a little sign that says I’m not wasting my life. I place too much faith in my fellow dogs and my heart gets broken every day. I keep hoping I can turn their lives around, but they keep turning mine around and upside-down and backwards.
I should have known he would weenie out of this mission. Do you know why? Because he’d done it a thousand times before, that’s why.
Okay, let’s get this sad situation out of the way. The King of Slackers marched two steps toward his combat assignment, cut a hard right turn, and went streaking down the hall to Slim’s bedroom, where he vanished. I didn’t see him slither under the bed, but I knew he did.
This was so predictable and so sad. You give your men a chance to prove themselves and this is what you get. Now, I would have to convene a court-martial and he would have to stand with his nose in the…
